I think that as you have more children, you get to the point where you just kind of accept these "phases" that they go through. For the moment, we're past the one where the toddler/preschoolers wears rainboots everywhere. Now we're at the one where Rutledge will only wear "Army Man Pants," which means camouflage . He has at least three pairs of camo shorts, including the typical army green, grey, and khaki, but now that real fall/early winter is here, they're not quite cutting it. Yesterday I found him three pairs of pants at a consignment store, so I think that's enough to get our Army Man operation going. He also got a pair of "Army Man" work boots, which, unfortunately, are at least two sizes too big. No problem.

Here's one of those archetypal preschool moments from our week: Gum In The Hair. Yes, a mohawk of it from front to back, and then another strip from the temples, up over the ear, to the nape of his neck. I tried the peanut butter method of removal (see below--the filthy face). I think with a few more minutes of patience on his part, this might have been enough, but when you have a child with sensory issues, there is only so much he can take.



I had only one solution: shaving it.

I also checked one more thing off my list today: winter boots for Walter and Ollie and snowpants for whichever one of them was lacking them. Now I think we're officially ready for any kind of weather that might come along. Ollie could really use a decent winter coat, but I'm holding tight until I run across an affordable one that will last a while (if he doesn't lose it...). It's been years since I've thought much about winter apparel, and we haven't really had/spent money on snow stuff much since we've lived here, but between the dire predictions of the Farmer's Almanac and simply the observations of how the weather has been so far this fall (colder, a bit wetter at times than normal), we could be in for a difference.

Positive moment for the day: running into a fellow knitting friend who helped me recover from a big disaster right in the middle of the elf hat I'm working on. I was about 25 rows up when I made The Big Mistake that I tried to repair myself (Big Mistake #2). I lost about 7 rows of work, but since this is a hat I'm making for someone else to give as a gift, it's worth the slight extra work. This is the 4th one of these hats that I've made, and I'm getting much more reliable and better as I continue to knit, especially as I make multiples of some of my recent projects. But I'm still not quite a Zen Knitter--if I don't watch myself, I tend to do lots of spacey, dumb things ;)

Everyone's concerned about the state of both the Economy with a capital E and also their own--we've switched in our family from freely working from home and working flexibly to a greater sense of the need to make a constant appearance in the physical offices so that he might make the impression of being more indispensible. I sure hope it works. So in the spirit of supporting this Improvement of Appearances and Commitment to Work as well as the necessary conservative belt-tightening, I've made a little list of some things I'd like to have if we didn't have to be fiscally responsible at the moment.

* Rachmaninoff Wind Chimes, which play "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini." This song was so intensely, incredibly significant, in that way that so many things are in high school. My friend Donna and I went crazy over this song, the movie "Somewhere in Time," and some odd little writing project we started about a protagonist named Jeremy Edmond Stone. Ah, the good old days. What I think is amazing is that my wind would blow so that the chimes hit in the correct order. On some fundamental level, I feel like we're just screwed when we believe that we have any control over nature.

* I'd also like one of those garden plaques that says, "I TRIED, BUT IT DIED."

* I've never been a jewelry person, but I'd really like a silver bracelet that says something simple and thoughtful on it.

* I still want a better bread machine. I do it by hand, and I didn't adore my old and yucky bread machine, but when the paddle started to bubble and the coating buckled, I was completely icked out.

Right now I'm watching a news piece on "Living on Only $20 for One Week." Hmmm. I think that's for one person. And only includes food. Is that really living?

My musings for today: which part of a year is the out-of-sync one for children? A friend said she thinks it's the 2nd half of the year, which is disheartening considering that we're in our first halves with Walter and Frances, and they're having a rough enough time already. Or perhaps it's simply that they are working on other skills (others ones than the ones that I see them struggling with right now), the way that a toddler often lags in language when making huge strides in gross motor skills...or vice versa. At any rate, despite some rough spots in the road, Frances is hitting a kind of flow in some areas. She's long been a slacker through much of gymnastics and dance, but in the past two weeks or so, she seems to have turned a corner. When she concentrates, which is certainly not all the time, she really does some amazing things. She recently mastered the shoot through, which is where she does a back turn up onto the uneven bar and then casts and pushes one leg through and onto the bar. She doesn't always control her flip around the bar afterwards, but it's a big achievement. Then, after some very rocky weeks in her modern dance class, she was acting like a limp noodle, sleepy, or just goofy. But yesterday, she was all on (thanks to her very untalented and crotchety mother joining in the class), and by the end she was remembered multi-step choreography and had learned the pretzel roll and the fan and was putting them together without any major blunders. It was pretty cool to watch. This followed up on a high-flow day in pottery class as well. Her teacher pulled me aside to tell me that I need to keep Frances in art classes because she is thriving there. Her trivet was pretty amazing, and then she made a small army of half inch long fruit, including an extremely cute pineapple. The pieces will be fired in two weeks, and then they'll do the glazing, at which point I'll have pictures. Walter has also had some big improvements in trumpet lately, especially in tempo and timing.

But our non-flow areas right now are math (Walter), anything academic (Walter), impulse control (Frances), and emotional stability. I'm kind of holding out with the belief that these things always seem to come around, just not all at the same time.